It was the beginning of the year, and winter in Guanajuato was already ending. Plants were recovering from a hard stage of strong winds and lack of water, but preparing themselves for blooming as spring was approaching. I was hoping, as every Monday, to harvest some produce from my greenhouse, but surprisingly, instead of finding fresh tomatoes and some salad for lunch, I found that my plants were actually gone. Not dry or death, but gone! The greenhouse is very well protected, so animals cannot come in, and I am always careful about closing the door properly to avoid any squirrel or cat inside the place. So the question was still unsolved: What happened to my plants? Was there a mystical creature stealing my vegetables?
I waited all day long inside my greenhouse to see if I could find the mysterious thief, but nobody came across the small glass door. I was almost giving up, and very disappointed I turned my head down, and looking at the floor I discovered a group of pillbugs walking with something green in their bodies. “Wait a minute, are those small crumbs from my missing plants?” I thought. Well, all my life I thought pillbugs were cute funny animals pleasant to observe, until I realized that they were the ones responsible of disappearing my plants.
It turns out that when soil has an unbalanced level of nutrients, pillbugs find their best environment to grow and reproduce, but of course they need to eat as well, so they sneak in and eat plants, not only their fruits, but also roots and stem. I was really surprised by this, but mostly worried about what to do with them since there is no fence in this world capable of getting rid of these animals. I couldn’t find a proper solution on Internet or gardening fellows, until Luisa, my friend, came with a very peculiar suggestion: add potato slices on the ground. It sounded crazy, but I was willing to try anything to safe all my effort done in the previous months. You know what happened in the end? It worked!
During the night I left some potato slices on the ground, and next morning I found them full of pillbugs on their surfaces, so all that was left to be done was to just take them to the compost. I did the same for a whole week, until the pillbugs were slowly disappearing. By the end of January, the soil had recovered from winter, so the nutrients were starting to balance again, and little by little I was needing less potato slices.
Thanks to Luisa I learnt probably the cheapest organic pesticide I have heard of so far; no need of killing the bugs or adding any chemical to the soil, just adding one of the most available veggies in the world, and problem solved!
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